Sunday, 11 December 2011

If I Wrote Actual Comics: the Bad Samaritan Comes to Gotham

One of the things that I've always liked about superhero comics is the wide range of characters that, though obscure, could change the playing field if used in the correct manner. An example of this in recent comics could be the current Madame Xanadu binge that DC is currently undergoing at the moment, what with her appearing in two main books at the moment, Demon Knights and Justice League Dark, as well as numerous appearances in things like the Batman: the Brave and the Bold tie-in comic.

So I as I was musing about storylines for Casstoons, I wondered if there was a way to incorperate the character of the Bad Samaritan, a character from the first series of the Outsiders way back in 1986 who later made another appearance in Checkmate a lot more recently, into the current continuity?

Well, I thought of a story concept that I thought might be interesting to explore or possibly write out in full later on if I have the time which involves the Samaritan, Stephanie Brown, Cassandra Cain and other members of their respective casts.

It's still kind of vague, but the basic idea is behind the cut.

First a little background into who the Bad Samaritan is, other than a guy with kind of a cheesy name, obviously. Zviad Baazovi, which is his real name, is a Georgian man who became the go to guy for various world governments, including the UK, USA and USSR, as well as numerous supervillains, who wanted some assassination, sabotaging, arm dealing and other general misdeeds done for them on the quiet.

Naturally this brought him into conflicts with various groups, such as the Outsiders and the Power Company, but despite his jobs including such things as shooting down a superhero team's plane so they crashed in the Indian Ocean or tried to organise mutated people into a more efficient criminal gang, he did manage to display something of a code of honour to what he did. Even rebelling against his employer when it turned out that he was attempting to resurrect Hitler to rule the country he hired Zviad to overthrow. This ended up getting him a high up position in the Checkmate super-spy organisation, but that was probably more due to the fact that he was really good at his job than his ethics.

If we assume that Checkmate doesn't exist in the same form in the current incarnation of the DCU, it's possible to assume that he continued his work or, possibly, decided to retire for some reason or another.

That's when the story comes in. Essentially, the idea is that in near future Gotham, Steph is both suprised and enraged to find that Dean, the boy who got her pregnant, told her the kid was probably someone else's and thne tried to get back together with her after she gave it for adoption, comes to her door, battered and looking for somewhere to hide.

What is revealled is that Dean, after his break up with Steph and the general reshuffling around that happened in the Cataclysm-No Man's Land-Infinite Crisis era of Gotham's history had ended up moving to a new town down the coast, where he'd fallen in with one of the local gangs. The gang had decided to make a quick buck by trying to get a ransom on some rich kid that goes to their school, assuming that the kid's family get their money from being Russian oil billionaires or something.

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

But, the kidnapping goes wrong and the kid ends up dead, and soon the majority of the gang is as well. As Sviad ends up reaching for his black book, and calling up all the various nasty people he's worked with over the years, and started calling in favours to get his grandson back.

Meaning that Dean now the most marked man in the entire Eastern Seaboard, and by going to Steph for help, he's effectively drawn her into the crossfire too. Even causing the guys hunting Dean to think that she might be the brains behind the hold deal due to her father having been a supervillain and all.

So now Steph and Dean have to go on the run together, as Steph has to deal with the fact that sometimes even her plucky attitude can be tested to the limit by some people.

Ah, it's the shape of an idea anyways. Needs to be fleshed out some more.